Infotech Lead Asia: The sustainable data center market will see accelerated growth in 2013 as it becomes more focused on cost-savings, and provides more efficient internal IT delivery methods such as virtualization, software-defined networks (SDNs) and the use of converged infrastructure solutions (so-called cloud-in-a-box).

Organizations are looking at getting the best value from their investments, and in 2013 they will therefore be more driven by the desire to reduce costs and improve sustainability.

Due to the rise of the data center infrastructure management (DCIM) market, now referred to as IT financial management, closely linked to the cost and availability of energy, the role of chief sustainability office (CSO) will become more commonplace in organizations.

Though a small market, DCIM will become more widely used in 2013, as its initial drives will be based on costs linked to energy and change. As organizations look more into cost-saving, energy represents a huge percentage of the cost base.

Development and operations (DevOps) will also be part of sustainable IT in 2013. As a broad topic, the movement needs organizations to adopt strong governance capabilities that mandate the adoption of agile processes for business benefit to ensure that best practices are followed across the development lifecycle.

Other trends to watch in 2013 will be the complete virtualization of all layers in the data center from the database, to the storage, out to the user, which will also drive the need for greater automation technologies and the associated orchestration layer.

For enterprises, the trend will focus more on sustainable IT and in particular DCIM and DevOPs. The bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) movement will become more of a reality between 2013/2014, and the mobile policies for corporate use and the growth of smartphones will be combined to provide a path for increased adoption by employees.

For vendors, 2013 looks set to see wider adoption of automation technologies because CIOs will have to deliver the same or more services at reduced cost.

The hype surrounding cloud computing can lead some organizations to predict the end of the internal data center, but Ovum considers that it is too early to make such bold statements. For many organizations, the question of workload classification remains a difficult issue, and the default position is to keep it on-premise. But even if the workloads are fully understood in terms of risk, cost, and value, the ability to move them is the Achilles heel of current technologies.

This scenario is highly unlikely to change unless workloads between cloud technologies become truly portable in 2013 or security and privacy concerns evaporate.